The Land Sings Back

‘The land knows you, even when you are lost.’

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist and author

The Land Sings Back reimagines our relationship to our breathing planet through the work of thirteen artists with ancestries across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Engaging with these cultural vocabularies through a lens of environmental justice, the exhibition approaches drawing as an active agent of social history, Indigenous knowledge and ecofeminist philosophy, rather than as a tool of illustration, classification and conquest. Exposing entanglements between the human-vegetal-animal, the works explore how botanical consciousness can reshape relationships among multitudinous life-forms, making room for regeneration amidst indebtedness, infrastructural collapse and neocolonial inheritance. The Land Sings Back encourages a connection with ancestral wisdom, reciprocal rather than extractive relationships with land.

Participating artists include Lado Bai, Shiraz Bayjoo, Lavkant Chaudhary, Jasmine Nilani Joseph, Manjot Kaur, Otobong Nkanga, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah, Joydeb Roaja, Anupam Roy, Anushka Rustomji, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, U.Arulraj and Charmaine Watkiss.

The exhibition is curated by Natasha Ginwala, Artistic Director of Colomboscope, co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 16 and one of Frieze’s Five Curators to Watch in 2025. It is produced as a collaboration between Colomboscope, Sri Lanka and Drawing Room, London, UK.

Directors of the Drawing Room note, ‘Drawing Room invited Natasha Ginwala due to her interest in practices exploring multispecies ecologies, coloniality, environmental justice and their interconnectedness as well as her strong reputation for intergenerational curating to bring attention to exceptional talent emerging in South Asia and Africa. The exhibition is the fruition of extensive research, with the selection distinguished by high artistic standards as the artists shape cultural discourse in the region.’

The exhibition and its associated public programme engage with a range of pressing questions with research-led approaches around multispecies ecologies, coloniality, and environmental justice.  It brings attention to networked extractive systems that spread toxicity, polarisation, climate emergencies and mass displacement. Growing from some of the artworks that were initiated at ‘Way of the Forest’, Colomboscope 2023-24 (an interdisciplinary arts festival in Colombo, Sri Lanka), it builds new and broader alliances with creative practitioners in the UK and African heritage practitioners. Methodologies include site-led recordings, archival research, communal pedagogy and expanded forms of drawing incorporate sound work, zines, ceramics, and posters. The public and discourse programme is produced in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World & The Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London and with the Paul Mellon Centre.

Supported by Cockayne Grants for the Arts, University College London (Furthering Cultures of Decolonisation within Research), Paul Mellon Centre, Anojie Amerasinghe and Hugues Marchand, Mor Charpentier, Taimur Hassan, Project 88 (Mumbai), Rob Dean London, 421 Arts Campus (Abu Dhabi), Jhaveri Contemporary, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.

Contact details:

Kate Macfarlane [email protected]

George Bray [email protected]